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Justice Clarence Thomas suggests US should regulate Twitter and Facebook:
Justice Clarence Thomas suggested on Monday that Congress should consider whether laws should be updated to better regulate social media platforms that, he said, have come to have "unbridled control" over "unprecedented" amounts of speech.
The provocative and controversial opinion comes as Twitter banned former President Donald Trump from its platform for violating its rules on incitement of violence and some conservatives have called on more regulations in the tech world to combat what they view as political bias on social media.
"If part of the problem is private, concentrated control over online content and platforms available to the public, then part of the solution may be found in doctrines that limit the right of a private company to exclude, " Thomas wrote in a 12-page concurring opinion Monday.
Thomas's stance will raise concerns from critics who point out that social media platforms have not historically been subject to such content regulation, but instead have been left to devise their policies on their own.
[...] Today's digital platforms, Thomas argued, "provide avenues for historically unprecedented amounts of speech," but he said it also concentrates control "of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties."
[...] "The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions," he added.
[...] The conservative justice said that the court will soon have "no choice" but to address how legal doctrines apply to "privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms."
Katie Fallow, a First Amendment expert at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University said that the group actually shares Thomas concern about the power over speech being concentrated in the hands of so few. "But we think that concentrating that same power in the hands of government regulators will not necessarily solve the problems associated with social media companies." Instead, she worried it might exacerbate the issue.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @02:49AM (10 children)
As far as I can tell, what Thomas is really suggesting is that when a platform becomes central to broad communications, excluding people affects civil liberties in a way analogous to restaurants excluding people - it becomes a civil rights problem.
So we return to the age-old question of whether freedom of (dis)-association was worth all those segregated lunch counters. And if not, how does this play with access to computing services?
Conversely, if the problem is that all the platforms are so big that they're holding a gatekeeping power analogous to that of government, perhaps antitrust, rather than civil rights, would be the place to start (but I didn't see Thomas mentioning that).
(Score: 5, Informative) by Socrastotle on Wednesday April 07 2021, @04:27AM (9 children)
He's referencing, without citing a number of cases, with Marsh vs Alabama [cornell.edu] likely being the most overt.
In short a guy wanted to distributed pamphlets on privately owned property. But the privately owned property had opened itself up largely to the public - a "company town". The land owners said 'Go away. We don't want people handing out pamphlets.' Guy refused and was arrested for trespass. Case went to the Supreme Court, and his conviction was overturned. The court ruled that "The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it." Pretty crystal clear comparison to today. A company that oversees the speech of literally about a third of the our entire species' ability to communicate with one another has become rather more public than private.
Some simple solutions that would have minimal directly negative consequences would be getting ride of social media data centralization and requiring companies to use open protocols once they reach a certain size. So for instance each and every post (sans those removed for law violation, and not TOS violation) that is made on Facebook becomes openly, and freely, available (without throttling) and can be accessed via API. If you want to make a "Freebook" where nothing is banned and all comments on Facebook are a subset of all comments on your site, then you'd be free to.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday April 07 2021, @11:59AM (8 children)
Aaaand here you hit the limits of your analogy with the Marsh vs Alabama.
Distributing pamphlets brought no direct cost to the land owners, so their "because I don't fucking like it" argument can be easily dismissed.
In contrast, calling an API to scrap the Facebook pages and make them a subset of "Freebook" comes with the bandwidth, CPU, RAM cost for Facebook - demanding them to work for nothing is servitude at best and slavery at worst.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of Freebook, but it will necessary be a P2P architecture, in which the willful participants carry the (shared) responsibility for the costs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Socrastotle on Wednesday April 07 2021, @02:16PM (3 children)
So are you against all regulations? Never struck me as a hardcore libertarian type.
The not-quite-strawman there is referencing the fact that all regulations come with costs. What I'm talking about here for the entities that it would affect would have a cost of effectively zero relative to their scale - and scale being critical since the main thing we're talking about is how an entity serving 3 billion is rather different than one serving a a more "reasonable" amount. The computing cost for Facebook to server an additional copy-on-demand of whatever content is going to be a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a single percent of their netcome. Even more so because it is by all definition 100% static data.
If you look at basically any regulation in existence on smaller entities, you're going to see what would be a dramatically larger regulatory cost for often far less clear gain - than what I am proposing here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07 2021, @06:43PM
This would easily fall under the umbrella of digital privacy laws.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 08 2021, @12:15AM (1 child)
True... until such a moment it is no longer true.
Up to you to demonstrate that "a cost of effectively zero relative to their scale" is maintained no matter how the market outside them evolve. Especially when you operate under the assumption of a Freebook entity for which the Facebook data is just a subset.
Before raiding your stock of straw, I suggest it's better to state your assumptions and check them - an exercise of extrapolating your argument beyond those assumption will be a wise thing too.
Strawman with a whiff of "attack to person" which doesn't even get used in the argumentation. Are you sure you needed it?
Taking it at face value, as a question: no, I'm not against regulations. I'm just against simple, neat and wrong solutions to complex problems.
And I used that as an example to put into evidence the "cost" factor, which will need to be addressed in the design for a better solution (other factors to be considered may exist).
Because "externalizing the cost and plundering the benefits" is wrong no matter if it used by greedy capitalists, authoritarian commies or anyone in between the two extremes. Reality imposes consequences, you don't get free card in the responsibility matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Thursday April 08 2021, @03:57PM
I think you are misunderstanding the scale. Each and every message on Facebook is delivered to a multitude of other individuals through a wide array of methods, largely based on dynamic analysis factoring in whatever motives Facebook has at the moment as well.
This suggestion has a worst case scenario of a *static* delivery of *n* additional messages, where *n* is the number of services genuinely reposting content posted to Facebook. Simple laws could require content grabbed be used only when actively posted, and no content may be requested (by the same actor) more than once. The scale of this, even when huge, is completely negligible to the normal day-to-day business of Facebook - or any company that such a regulation could affect.
And you misunderstood my comment. I know you do not oppose all regulations. It was rhetorical, emphasizing that probably did not consider the implications of your own statement. You are, I would assume, ideologically opposed to this idea - and so you need to formulate some reason for that opposition ad hoc. Many people do this and it just as often ends up resulting in the same scenario of where the new improvo rationale ends up undermining their own other more thoughtfully considered views and values.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday April 08 2021, @02:40AM (3 children)
Nope. P2P simply isn't viable for social media. And don't quote me links to the failing projects that've tried it, please. They found out it wasn't viable, and why, which is a large part of why they've failed.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 08 2021, @03:34AM (2 children)
Network effect, yes.
Otherwise, as technical approach, there's nothing wrong - large adhoc communities of pirates using torrent/magnets proves it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:15AM (1 child)
Erm, no, the technical reasons are the primary ones. And your example is an excellent demonstration of why. You get one of two choices with P2P:
A) You can use up a fuckton of everyone's drive space for massive redundancy.
B) You can live with the fact that a whole lot of your network's content will not be available from even one source at any given time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 08 2021, @05:35AM
Given that any average person keeps acquaintance-or-closer level of relations with max 1000 persons (Dunbar number is 150 for close, stable relations), the cached/redundancy of storage space for availability is in the affordable area for the average consumer of the social media: $250 for a 2TB SSD comes with a minimum of 2GB of cache/relation for a very well connected socialite.
Yes, that means a PC at home rather than in intermittent on-off tablet, a SoC (RasPi) with external storage will do.
The unwillingness of the Joe Average consumer to spend $300 for the setup makes the network effect act against the solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0